(urth) _Edges_ shows "Suzanne Delage" involves memory loss; SD is probably Bram Stoker's _Dracula_

[Gwern Branwen]

Some additional points that I've noticed:

- Gene Wolfe repeatedly cites Bram Stoker as one of the most
influential writers on him (and I rather doubt this is due to, say,
_Lair of the White Worm_), and there are references to Dracula
elsewhere in Wolfe: _The Land Across_ seems to have Dracula as the
primary antagonist, so having a short story which is about Dracula is
*extremely* Wolfean.

     More broadly, I'd note that Wolfe made heavy use of the
document/epistolary novel format, and various kinds of 'rewrites' of
his heroes: _An Evil Guest_ and "The Call of Cthulhu" being the most
obvious genre horror homage instance.
- as well as the deliberately-cryptic reference to 'a certain
fundamentalist church', I can now explain the following cryptic
reference to 'certain racial minorities'! No one has ever tried to
explain that reference despite its crypticness begging for
explanation, and I was unable to do so myself: was it referring to
African-Americans? But that makes little sense in lily-white New
England in the 1910s, left unexplained what the other racial minority
would be (because there has to be at least two if it's plural, so who
are they? Mexicans? that makes even less sense), doesn't explain why
it'd need to be so cryptic, and has no connection to anything. It
always bugged me as just one of the many inexplicable chekhov-guns in
SD indicating that all the extant theories had some fatal flaw.

    However, with _Dracula_ as a template, we can immediately infer
the 'certain racial minorities' because there are two racial
minorities which assist Dracula - Gypsies/Romanis, and Jews. Needless
to say, there were plenty of Jews emigrating to the USA and
concentrating in the Northeast, so there's no problem there; most
interestingly, when I checked, this is *also* true of Gypsy/Romanis
(which is unsurprising if you think about it, but good to check), and
there seems to have even been a bit of a moral panic in New England
around the 1910s-1920s:
https://smallstatebighistory.com/when-the-roma-came-to-rhode-island/
So, this identification works historically.

    And, like in the novel, they would be at Dracula's command, and
would be the narrator's foes, accounting for his sudden puzzling
memory-lapse and coyness: erased along with everything else to do with
Dracula. (And also, for out-of-universe reasons: after all, if Wolfe
had the narrator straightup say 'oh yeah, I remember now, there were a
bunch of Jews and Gypsies recently immigrated from Eastern Europe at
school', that would give away the game and been too blatant for his
tastes. I mean, does anyone want to argue that somehow the Proust or
cloning or Snow White or lesbian affair interpretations can account
for that being inserted into the narrative? or that anyone would be
thinking something other than 'oh! well now it's *obviously* a vampire
story of *some* sort'?).
- SD is an inversion of Dracula: I have not reread _Dracula_ in part
because I opened the first page and this is what I read:

    > How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made
manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been
eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the
possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact.
There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may
err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from
the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made
them.

    And I had to stop there to update my page because this fits
absurdly perfectly. The very first page of _Dracula_ explains that
it's meant to be contemporary documentation in order to avoid the
flaws of later memory, to create a reliable complete narrative, so as
to ensure people can later on believe something 'almost at variance
with the possibilities of later-day belief' (one might even say, a
history of 'some extraordinary experience, some dislocation of all we
expect from nature and probability'...?).

    Therefore, what would be the inversion of _Dracula_'s description
of itself? It would be devoid of contemporary documentation, composed
solely of statements of unreliable later memory, about a history at
variance with later-day belief which hides back in the shadows and is
not believed by anyone. It would be... SD.
- On a minor sidenote, in one of the interviews he mentions Stoker,
Wolfe also mentions that one reason he likes working with small
presses is that there are so few people involved. So there wouldn't've
been many editors or people involved beyond Virginia Kidd.

-- 
gwern
https://gwern.net